MORGAN Leigh VANDERPOOL

(they/them)

LICSW, TC-TSY Facilitator & faculty, E-RYT

I have always been deeply interested in understanding how to find resolution to the world's most complex, systemic health related puzzles. After over a decade of working in the social work field I understand that the complex trauma of colonization & white supremacy are the root cause of every layer of health complexity and challenge that we individually and collectively face: from how we feel in our bodies, how we relate & connect to each other, and how we are either are in an oppressive or freeing/healthy relationship with the world we live in.

As a white, queer, non-binary, multi-culturally bilingual, & multi-systems' adept clinician, social worker, facilitator, and activist, I am compassionately aware of the intersectional factors of privilege and oppression, and how it is my innate responsibility to deconstruct the impacts of white supremacy in the way we work to heal individually & collectively.

I conceptualize all health issues as nervous system wounds incurred in the intersectional relationship we each have with oppression. I approach any layer of healing work via prioritizing healing our individual nervous system's function through trauma sensitive movement and breath practices. And I maintain that same focus while understanding the multi-systemic impact of interlocking systems of oppression on our nervous systems; as they show up as adaptive responses to violence caused by systems of poverty, racism, queer-phobia, transphobia, ablelism, gender-based violence, and colonialism, including Hinduphobia inevitably included in any white adaptation of “yoga”.

***Responsibility statement- I am profoundly apologetic about any unintentional relational and systemic harm caused by my involvement in culturally appropriative or inherently white dominate systems, within my practice up to to this point, and any points in the future, as I’m working through the multilayered challenges of being a white person trying to be of service to healing complex trauma, through deconstructing systems of power.***